(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)June 24, 2019

MAHWAH, N.J.-The semester’s programming of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies culminated with a teachers’ workshop on May 22 on “Ethnic Cleansing: When Does it become Genocide.” The goal of this workshop was to assist teachers in learning about its occurrence, and how to bring a meaningful discussion of the topic into their classrooms. Sixty-six educators from throughout New Jersey participated in the event.

Lawrence Glaser, executive director of the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education, welcomed participants with a brief talk about moral courage in the Holocaust. One of the individuals to whom Glaser drew our attention was Ernst Leitz, the CEO of the German firm that produced Leica cameras, who in the guise of his firm’s employees being assigned to posts away from Europe enabled hundreds of Jews to leave Germany. Also discussed were Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, who organized the villagers of the Auvergne village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon to save Jews, and the Polish social worker, Irene Sendler, who was instrumental is rescuing scores of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Delivering the keynote was Dr. Laura Cohen, executive director of the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College/CUNY in Bayside, New York.  As she explained, the topic of “ethnic cleansing” raises issues that have vexed experts and laypeople or years. The trouble is that the lines between what we have come to know as “ethnic cleansing” (the process of removing a group or groups from specific geographic or political area based on race, ethnicity, religion and/or other criteria) and Genocide, as defined in the 1948 U.N. Convention, are- frankly- blurred.

Cohen made it clear that although the term gained currency after its use by the media to describe Serb initiatives to remove non-Serbs, especially Muslim Bosnians, from its territories during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the phenomenon of forcibly removing unwanted populations has been with us for much longer and persists into the present. She also emphasized that no group in former Yugoslavia refrained from participation in forcing population transfers. Very strong visuals that were often disturbing accompanied her presentation. Not surprisingly, a lively discussion followed that made clear the challenging nature of the issues raised by the workshop’s subject.

Next on the agenda was Jill McCracken, who recently retired as a teacher of social science and psychology from Holmdel High School. Her task was to provide hands-on direction on how to bring the subject of ethnic cleansing into the classroom. In particular, she stressed the need to understand the complicated history of the Balkans, especially the hardening ethnic and religious divisions resulting from shifting borders and political hegemony. Both Ottoman rule and the creation of a Serb-led Yugoslavia, in McCracken’s view, made for a problematic legacy that students need to appreciate.

MacCracken brought to her presentation the experience of having worked on the ground in post-conflict Kosovo, embedded with U.S. troops of the 82^ndAirborne Division, attempting to reconcile Albanian and Serbian teens. She also spoke about her work with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe evaluating the quality of election in nations developing democracy, serving in Croatia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Macedonia.  As did Laura Cohen, she used a variety of photographs and maps to bring home her points.

In addition to her service at Holmdel High School, for more than 20 years McCracken was a member of the Board of Directors at the Center for Holocaust, Human Rights and Genocide Education at Brookdale Community College.  A 1996 recipient of the Mandel Museum Fellowship from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she received the John S. Grauel Scholarship to study at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2000. She received the N.J. State Holocaust Commission’s Maud Dahme Award for Moral Courage as well as the 9/11 Tribute Center’s Educator of the Year. Today, MacCracken teaches forensic psychology at the Mainline Night School in Radnor, Pennsylvania.

Laura Cohen received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University’s Division of Global Affairs in 2018. Her dissertation, “Conflicted Walls, Mixed Messages: Untangling Transitional Justice and Traumatic Memories at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial in Bosnia,” builds upon the extensive fieldwork she has conducted across that country since 2010 as well as at site memorials in Germany, Poland, Cambodia and Rwanda. Additionally, her chapter about the Srebrenica Memorial was published in the edited volume, “Understanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing and Teaching Genocide” (Murray, ed.; University of Calgary Press 2017). Dr. Cohen also holds an M.S. from New York University’s Center of Global Affairs and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School. She previously spent 14 years in the corporate sector, including at Ogilvy and Mather and at Viacom Media.

Jill McCracken’s spouse, Dan, who served with the U.S. Army’s 82^ndAirborne Division in Kosovo, provided a participant-view of what it was like to maintain the peace the belligerent Muslim Albanian and Eastern Orthodox Serbian factions in the former Yugoslav region. Dan McCracken explained that conditions on the ground revealed a nuanced situation in which the line between victims and perpetrators was often blurred. Overall, he emphasized that both ordinary Serbs and Kosovar Albanians welcomed the U.S. presence because it brought an end to conflict and gave hope for the future. It was in this context that his unit spent a good deal of their time protecting houses of worship, mosques as well as churches.

Having been injured during a training mission after his deployment, Dan McCracken received a medical discharge from the Army and is now is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, where he studies biochemistry and molecular biophysics, and conducts research into cancer metastasis.

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